Number Crunch: Valuing Huffpo vs. 'WaPo'

"At some point the value of the Huffington Post will no doubt pass the value of the Washington Post," writes Mark Penn in The Wall Street Journal.

Maybe we shouldn't trust the prognostications of a guy who's mostly famous for managing Hillary Clinton to defeat in the 2008 Democratic primaries -- and whose calculations about the number of Americans blogging for a living are highly suspect. But this is kind of a fun game to play. When will the Huffington Post be worth more than the Washington Post?

This is a tricky one for a number of reasons. For starters, Huffpo is a privately-held company, while the Post is part of a much larger conglomerate that also includes Newsweek, Slate and (the real revenue-driver) the education company Kaplan. For laziness' sake, I'm not going to try to break out the value of the Post but instead consider the entire Post Co., which, as of today, has a market cap of $3.79 billion.

Huffpo, meanwhile, was reportedly valued at around $100 million in December, when Oak Investment Partners pumped in $25 million. Just a few months earlier, people I consulted guesstimated its value at around $40 million (rather than $200 million, a figure Huffpo itself seemed to be floating).

That's a pretty nice jump. Still, at that rate of growth, it would take Huffpo 40.8 years to reach a valuation of $3.79 billion.

But, then, the Post Co. is not a stationary target. Its shares are down 40 percent over the past year. Assuming it continues to lose value at the rate it has in the last 12 months, Huffpo will make good on Penn's prediction much earlier -- a little more than 500 days from now, when they'll both be worth about $225 million.

So there you have it. The Huffington Post will surpass The Washington Post Co. in value sometime between Sept. 2010 and February 2050. Mark your calendars.

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Caveats: The method I used to arrive at the conclusion above has zero validity, obviously. Also, I probably got some of the arithmetic wrong.